In Honor of International Darwin Day

Part of the fun of doing genealogy is finding interesting and sometimes unexpected connections between the people you’re researching and other interesting – and much better known - people.  Since I’m committed to probing all the nooks and crannies of my grandchildren’s family history, I often uncover some interesting documents and fascinating family connections as well. 

Here’s one to celebrate “International Darwin Day”.  [Note:  It’s longer than usual, but that’s because it’s complicated.]

Nathan Appleton by Gilbert Stuart

Two of the grandkids’ 64 great-great-great- great grandparents were Nathan Appleton of Boston and his second wife Harriot Coffin Sumner, the daughter of Jesse Sumner of Boston and Harriot Coffin of Portland, Maine.  Appleton (1779 – 1861) was a noted merchant turned industrialist & banker and also a member of Congress who along with other investors (now known collectively by historians as the “Boston Associates”) introduced the power loom to America, established cotton mills at Waltham and founded the mill city of Lowell, Massachusetts, thus revolutionizing the American factory system. 

Longfellow and his family

With his first wife Maria Theresa Gold (who died in 1833), Nathan Appleton had five children, three of whom lived to adulthood.  Those three children were author/essayist/artist Thomas Gold Appleton (1812 – 1884), who never married, Frances Elizabeth Appleton (1817 – 1861) who married Harvard professor and famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Mary Appleton (1813 - 1889) who married Robert James Mackintosh, the son and biographer of Sir James Mackintosh, member of Parliament, political philosopher, historian, rector of the University of Glasgow and sometime chief judge of Bombay. Mary Appleton’s husband Robert Mackintosh served as the colonial governor of Antiqua in the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands.

Throughout their lives, the Appleton siblings – whether half or full sibs - all maintained close contact with one another, either by letter or in person. In fact, as you will see, letters are a key element of this “Darwin Day” story. 

It is worthy of note that both Thomas Gold Appleton and his sister Frances were listed in the Mackintoshes’ Regents Park, London household in the English census of 1841 (see below) while they were visiting their sister.  Thomas and Frances's entries are easily found by looking for the "F" in the last column - indicating that they were born in "Foreign Parts".

 Their father’s second family in Boston was just beginning -  with the birth of their half-sister Harriot  in November 0f 1841.

Meanwhile, back in England, because of their family connections, the English Mackintoshes were traveling in interesting circles.  Mary Appleton Mackintosh’s father-in-law, Sir James Mackintosh,  was one of the most distinguished statesmen of his time.  Like Nathan Appleton, Sir James had children by two wives, with Mary’s husband Robert being a child of his second marriage.  Sir James’ second wife (and thus Mary Appleton Mackintosh’s mother-in-law) was Catherine Allen.  She had a sister Elizabeth who was married to Josiah Wedgwood the Younger.  Wedgwood was the son of Josiah Wedgwood of Etruria, the famous potter and founder of the Wedgwood pottery dynasty. 

Josiah Wedgwood the Elder

Elizabeth Allen and Josiah Wedgwood the Younger had a daughter named Emma Wedgwood, who was Robert Mackintosh’s first cousin. Further cementing this Allen – Wedgwood - Mackintosh family relationship, Emma’s brother Hensleigh Wedgwood married Robert Mackintosh’s sister Fanny. Thus, the Mackintoshes and the Wedgwoods were very closely connected.

Then, on 29 January 1839, to further complicate the family tree, Emma Wedgwood married her own first cousin with his own Wedgwood connection – a young man who was the son of her father’s sister Susannah Wedgwood. Emma’s husband was a former medical student turned theology student turned natural scientist.  

Eight years earlier, he had sailed off to far-off places with strange names - the Galapagos Islands, Tasmania and Patagonia -  in search of “specimens.”  The ship he sailed aboard was called the “Beagle” and the young scientist’s name was Charles Robert Darwin, who was born 202 years ago today. 

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 - 1882)

In November of 1859, twenty years after his marriage to Emma Wedgwood, Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”; all the 1250 copies that were printed were fully subscribed before publication. 

While the Darwin family of England and the Appleton family of Boston were not themselves related, they shared mutual connections through their Allen – Wedgwood - Mackintosh relations.  In fact, a number of the published letters of both Charles Darwin and his wife Emma contain references to Mary Appleton Mackintosh and her children – who were regular visitors at the Darwin’s home - as well as her brother Thomas Gold Appleton of Boston, who visited Darwin on several occasions.

 
Recently, an original manuscript letter from Charles Darwin to Thomas Gold Appleton dated 31 March 1846 appeared on the manuscript market. The letter was not included in the previously published edition of collected Darwin letters.

Thomas Gold Appleton

In this letter, Darwin was responding to Tom Appleton’s gift of a copy of the “Report of the Exploring Expeditions to the Rocky Mountains” by John C. Frémont.

He wrote to Appleton about his sister Mary and her family, observing, “Some not long time since we had a visit from Mrs. Mackintosh & Robert, with only the Baby as the other children were a little unwell. Your sister looked decidedly better than when I last saw her before, but yet sadly delicate - I hope to hear of her paying you a visit at Boston this summer.”

That’s the neat thing about family history; you never know when or where a small, previously unknown piece of family arcana will surface.  A handwritten Charles Darwin letter to the grandkids’ 3^th great-grand Uncle Tom Appleton mentioning “sadly delicate” 3^rd great grand aunt Mary and their little Mackintosh cousins would be a nice addition to their family archive. 

Now, if I can just find the spare $10,000.00 to buy it….

Was There Life Before PowerPoint???

In between moving piles of snow and ice from place to place, most of the past week was given over to creating, editing, revising, and tweaking lots of  PowerPoint slides for the spring and summer’s upcoming lectures. I figure that between now and the end of March, I will have worked on more than 500 slides.

It struck me that I’ve been doing this “speaking thing” for a very long time.

How long is a "very long time"?

Before the internet was widely available and affordable. Before email. Before a publicly available SSDI - when acronyms like that suggested social diseases. Before the release of the 1910 census. Before genealogy software costing less than $200 was widespread. Before Footnote, FamilySearch & Ancestry.com existed. Before digital cameras, laptop computers, LCD projectors and cell phones were common. Back when “digitization” meant something like having your fingers re-attached after an industrial accident. Back when many of us who were serious about genealogy owned our own personal in-house microfilm readers (mine is a tabletop Model 3360 Realist).

Back before Google and Wikipedia. Before PERSI. Way back when genealogists amassed large personal libraries of real books, read the queries in “The Genealogical Helper” and wrote real letters requesting information, remembering to enclose a SASE and put stamps on the envelope. When “research” meant actually going to a library, public government building or archival repository.

Before the first NERGC and well before the first National Genealogical Society conference in Atlanta, Georgia in May 1981 as well. 

So, what was it like back in genealogy's horse-and-buggy days?

Back in the day, most of us on the circuit who lectured for regional and later for national audiences used overhead projectors and transparencies to illustrate our talks.  A box of 50 transparencies cost about $25 to buy. Each “slide” took a while to plan out and construct.  Mistakes had to be corrected the old-fashioned way … by making a brand-new slide.  Slides that needed frequent revisions took time to re-make and greatly increased costs, so the goal was to make slides that could be used over and over without much change.  After all, a single lecture often used a whole box of transparencies.

A transparency that could do double-duty and be used again in a completely different talk on a completely different topic was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  Why?  Because nobody gets rich by speaking to genealogical audiences.  A penny saved and all that. Frankly, nobody who lectures even covers expenses, long-term, if you count the actual time spent in research and in outlining and writing the talk.

When I tell my adult children what kind of income after expenses I make per talk and then divide that amount by the hours preparing and presenting a talk, they correctly point out that I'd do much better wearing a paper hat and asking, "Would ya like fries with that?"

(The guy who fixed my furnace last week gets $174.50 per hour and doesn't have to explain to large audiences that the 1890 census wasn't actually completely burned up in the 1921 fire. . .)

The financial realities of speaking to genealogists notwithstanding, laptop computers, LCD projectors and presentation software like PowerPoint have changed the "production side" of genealogical lecturing for the better, for speakers and audiences alike.  However, it still takes time and thought to construct a good lecture slide.

Here are some Rules of Thumb for presenters:  if the text on your slide is too small to be read easily by someone with average vision in the back of a dimly-lit room, either MAKE IT BIGGER OR scrap the slide altogether and start over.   

"Print Too Small!" is probably the most frequent complaint of audiences, followed closely by "Speaker Mumbles!". You can easily take steps to make sure you're not the recipient of such reviews.

Also, if you put too much information on a single slide, you’re doing your audience a grave disservice by choking them with data. Consider using a series of slides with simpler, more easily digestible bits of information and then ending with a summary slide with easy-to-read “bullet points.”  Unlike old-fashioned transparencies, electrons are cheap. Use 'em.

A well-placed bit of animation is good every now and then; trying to see if you can use ALL of PowerPoint's bells and whistles in a single lecture suggests that you may want to re-think what you're doing.

If you absolutely, positively HAVE TO put an web URL in a slide (because the conference organizers wanted your hand-out four months prior to the event… before you even knew you’d be mentioning the website…), there are three basic rules:  (1.) MAKE IT LARGE. (2.) Leave it on the screen for a while while you talk, even if it means putting it in the next slide as a header. (3.) Suggest a search engine alternative for locating the site.  If you’re good at what you do and know your stuff, you should be able to come up with the right keywords or search terms.

Here’s why:  Suppose you’re explaining how your listeners can get death certificates from the New York State Department of Health by mail.  The web address for the page of the New York State Department of Health where you can get the forms for ordering by mail is:

http://www.health.state.ny.us/vital_records/mailrequests.htm. 

That’s a web address with lots of potential pitfalls.  Spell a word wrong or fail to put the dreaded “_” between “vital” and “records” in the address, and you’ll get a page that looks like this:

However, if you construct your informational slide to have the actual web address and then say: Google “NYS health vital records deaths mail” – which is much easier to remember/copy – your listeners will get a search return that looks like the screen-shot below.  Note that the third and fourth entries will take them where they want to be with a minimum of trouble.

That’s it for now.  Back to those slides. They just won't tweak themselves.

BTW, tune in back here tomorrow (12 February 2011).  It's International Darwin Day!

Dashing Through The Snow?

Come February, especially when the snow and ice seem never-ending, it’s often helpful to think about how the people who voluntarily lived in these northerly parts a century ago actually coped with it all. 

Could it have been as idyllic as the postage stamp above makes it out to be?

Consider the widow from Warsaw, New York. Here’s the story that got me thinking:

Just before the most recent snowstorm, I was cataloging a series of letters that had been written by an elderly widow over a span of several years in the first quarter of the 20^th century.  Each letter was postmarked from the rural western New York village of Silver Springs in Wyoming County, where the woman “wintered” with her daughter’s family rather than live alone. The letters were addressed to the man who obviously worked as her handyman & house caretaker back in her hometown of Warsaw.

Each letter contained specific instructions for laying fires in the coal stoves to take the chill off the house and getting the plumber to turn the house water back on. There were also some basic cleaning and shopping requests to better prepare the Warsaw house for her return.  Most of the letters were written around mid-March, a time that can still be pretty wintery in western New York.  (Note: the legendary four-day Blizzard of 1888 began on March 11th).

The letters’ author noted that she would return home to Warsaw in late March, once her doctor son-in-law was able to put his automobile back on the road.  

"...put his automobile back on the road."  That’s when it struck me: during this time period, people with automobiles in the rural villages of New York rarely drove them during the winter because of the condition of the roads, most of which were still unpaved. Snowstorms, frozen road ruts, winter mud and auto travel were rarely compatible.   

After all, automobile owners had a lot of their hard-earned money invested in their vehicles and winter roads could do a whole lot of damage to their investment.

The “Good Roads” movement, sponsored by such diverse groups as the League of American Wheelmen and the National Highways Association, got seriously underway at the beginning of the 20^th century.   However, it was mostly concerned with long-distance travel and with connecting cities with populations of 50,000 or more, not with paving the byways and country lanes of small towns and villages.  Rural people and their town governments were left to their own ingenious devices – generally to fend for themselves.

In fact, in most parts of rural New York and New England, our ancestors considered their tried-and-true horses and horse-drawn vehicles to be much more reliable for winter travel than their city cousins’ new-fangled automobiles. Snow plows – a creature of the automobile age -  were not yet a fixture on rural roads; however, in some areas, the snow roller was a familiar sight on the road after a winter storm.

Snow roller? 

This huge wooden barrel-like contraption, rarely seen by cityfolk, plied the country roads behind a team of horses, its great weight packing down the snow on the road into a firm hard-packed surface easily navigated by sleighs with runners, not wheels.  Thanks to the snow roller, travel over snow-covered unpaved roads in winter was not only possible but also comfortable. 

Here’s a photo of a horse-drawn snow roller.   

The original image is in the collection of the University of Vermont Libraries’ Center for Digital Initiatives, specifically the “Tennie Toussaint Photographs” collection. Check it out (along with the other images in the collection) and get a better understanding of living in the rural northeast at the turn of the 20th century.

These days, snow rollers – like horse drawn sleighs - are things of the past and are fast fading from the collective memory. Not surprisingly, most people have never heard of them, and few have ever seen one. Still, for those of us who are family historians, it’s useful to think about these commonplace albeit forgotten things now and again, if only to better understand how our ancestors lived their daily winter lives. 

Unfortunately, no amount of thinking about these things will actually get the piles of last storm’s snow off my 210 feet of sidewalk.  

Perhaps I should fashion a small "human-propelled", sidewalk-wide version of the snow roller?

What’s Up for 2011

JANUS am I; oldest of potentates;

Forward I look, and backward, and below

I count, as god of avenues and gates,

The years that through my portals come and go.

                - From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Poet’s Calendar

The ancient Roman god Janus invoked by Longfellow in the poem fragment above was in charge of doors, gates and portals in ancient times. He is often portrayed on Roman coins with two faces – one face looks forward, while the other looks backward. For that reason, he’s called the god of new beginnings.

Since today is the first weekday of January at the beginning of a brand new year, it seems like the perfect time to look forward, especially since most of the time I write about doing history and genealogy – which is most certainly the “looking backward” part. 

After all, for a genealogist, looking backward is where it’s at.  And that’s what Mnemosyne’s magic mirror lets us do.

What lies ahead for the blog during 2011?  Current plans look like this:

First of all, I’ll be doing some looking backward and discussing the idea of memory and its role in the preservation of family history.  Specifically, I’ll be writing from time to time about how memories are formed, preserved and transmitted in families, how memory can be fickle and untrue (but still altogether pleasing) and about the things that can act as memory “triggers”, especially for those of us who do any kind of oral history. 

Next, I’ll be looking at books – specifically, some of the titles that I think contain some special relevance to the kind of research that we do. Some will be new-ish, but most will be things that you probably never heard discussed in genealogy circles.  I’ll try and demonstrate why I think that the book's important and deserving of your attention.  Occasionally, there will be a link to the Jonathan Sheppard Books website if we’ve catalogued something especially interesting.

I’ll also be writing about some of the things I’ve experienced that have made me a better researcher.  Sometimes, I’ll be talking about a technique that I’ve used in some other non-genealogy field that turned out to have some particular utility in genealogical research. Other times, I’ll be directing your attention elsewhere, to unusual sources of information – often archival - that you may not have heard about yet.

Finally, I’ll be writing about those periodic flashes that appear on Mnemosyne’s magic mirror.  I can’t tell you exactly what they are going to be, since I can’t see too far into the future.  Sometimes they’ll be autobiographical, occasionally they’ll be stories about folks I’ve been researching and sometimes they’ll be pieces written in the spirit of advocacy – since if we’re not passionate about the things we do, why bother doing them at all?

I'll also try to keep you posted on conferences, lectures and the like.

All I can say is that if I write about it here, it’s  likely to be something that I just had to talk about and something that I hope you’ll be interested enough to read about.

The Winter Issue of “New York Archives” Is Out!

My author’s copies of the Winter 2011 issue of New York Archives arrived in the mail last Friday.  Once again, the folks who put it all together at the New York State Archives Partnership Trust have done a great job.  It’s another good-looking issue, with Mark Twain (who spent lots of time at his wife’s family’s place in Elmira) on the cover. 

Yes, there’s a Twain-Elmira story inside called “Huck Finn Born In New York”, as well as a fascinating story about the political witch-hunt to identify and fire Communist teachers in NY schools and the records that were generated thereby. Then, there’s the story about the mansion George Westinghouse built in Schenectady, NY.  Plus, there’s a superb fact-filled article about Civil War drummer boys by Michael Aikey.  Mike is the director of the New York State Military Museum in Saratoga Springs, NY.  When he writes about things military that concern New York, he writes from the perspective of a highly informed insider.

My regular “genealogy department” article, spread across pages 38 and 39 is called “A Small War in Churubusco” and deals with some records of payments to New York veterans of the Mexican War that were authorized by the New York Legislature in the 1870s - many years before the US Congress agreed to provide the veterans of that war with pensions.  Naturally, it focuses on the genealogical info that can be gleaned from them and highlights a particular veteran who left New York for Wisconsin sometime in the late 1840s.  He later corresponded with an old friend’s widow in Buffalo and ultimately, the New York State Comptroller’s Office in an attempt to get his payment.  Along the way, he enlisted the aid of Alexander Kanaday, a firebrand activist/publisher/gold prospector who later founded the group that successfully lobbied Congress for the Mexican War veterans’ pensions.

An interesting aside – one of the reasons Congress was reluctant to pension Mexican War veterans was because so many of the Mexican War officers later served as Confederate officers during the Civil War.  The idea of voting “yea” on legislation to grant any former Confederate officer a  pension of any sort was a political “hot potato” for Northern Congressmen.

If you do any NYS research, you should consider becoming a member of the NYS Archives Partnership Trust; it’s not greatly expensive and you’ll likely recoup the expense in book discounts.

I sent off the draft of the next issue’s genealogy column last Thursday. While I won’t reveal the specific topic until it appears in April (i.e., Spring 2011), the “teaser” is as follows:  it mentions the Rockefellers, a piece of old wedding cake, download-able leaflets, a number 6b pencil and the National Archives. And much, much more.

P.S. This issue contains several Letters to the Editor.  The first one states (referencing the magazine) that "...yours is one of the BEST to cross my desk.  Visually attractive, well-researched and -written articles and I always learn something. Congrats!"  It's signed  

"David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, Washington, DC"

So, maybe you should check it out?  If AOTUS finds it worth reading, you will, too!

An End-Of-Year Thought - The Comfort Zone

The winter-dark leaves on the rhododendron visible from the kitchen window are beginning to open up from the tight curl they’ve recently wrapped themselves into, indicating that it’s now above freezing outside again.  Inside, the furnace is running, making some folks in unfriendly, oil-rich countries very happy. 

Things are all cozy inside.  The thermostat says the temperature inside the house is in the “comfort zone”.

Comfort zone.  Flannel sheets at night. Well-worn slippers to navigate cold floors.  A beat-up cardigan. Oatmeal for breakfast. Noodle soup later on.  Comfort zone.  Hard to beat!

The usual End of the Year activities include getting next year’s calendar up to date and making sure all the “writeoff-able” end-of-year business bills are paid, since tax time is almost upon us. It's nice to do it here in the Comfort Zone.

Some people make resolutions; I don’t bother anymore, since I’d rather save my “resolve” for more important things.  Nonetheless, since New Year’s Eve is a kind of “catch up and reflect” day, I tend to offer myself advice for the year ahead. (Yes, Self, I know I said I’d get back to work on that book I started writing last spring, but stuff got in the way.) 

So, in the spirit of public charity and graceful giving, I’ll share one piece of that New Year’s Eve advice with you. It’s just advice; you can take it or leave it.  Still, you might find it useful.

Listen up - here it comes:   since a new year is barreling down on us (and you want it to be better than the last one, right?), try to get out of your “comfort zone” on a fairly regular basis when it comes to your research habits. Here’s why that’s important:

The older you get, the easier it is to do the same thing over and over again.  Pretty soon, you’re an “expert” about something. Next thing you know, you spend lots of your time with that “thing” you’re now an expert about.  Sometimes, people even ask for your opinion or advice because, after all, you do that same thing all the time.  You’re The Expert.

Problem is, you may not even notice that many of those other skills that I like to call your “peripheral skills” are drying up and wasting away from lack of use. 

Here’s an example:  Genealogists tend to read lots of stuff that directly relates to the things they do when they’re researching. If you work a lot in the northeastern states during the colonial period and are considered an “expert” on, say, migration into Massachusetts in the 1630s, you’re probably on top of most of the new things that are being published.  Chances are you’re very comfortable with that location and time period, research-wise.

However, the very best researchers know the importance of casting a wide net, not only to be sure they’re not missing something important, but also to keep their peripheral skills sharp.  So, when the New Year rolls around, plan on getting out of your research comfort zone and learning/researching something new.  It’ll keep your research and analytical skills much sharper.

For example, you might try expanding your historic world view, especially since you’ve probably forgotten much of what you’ve learned in school. 

Let’s say you’re cozy with Massachusetts in 1640.  You know the records available for research.  You know the Major Players of the time period.  You know the social structure, the religious views, etc.  You’ve read all THE IMPORTANT BOOKS.

If you want to get out of your comfort zone, perhaps you should investigate what was happening in Virginia during that same time period. Or better yet, travel farther afield.  What was going on in the area that is now Arizona and New Mexico in 1640?  How about in China?  Think about the slave trade: what was life like along the coast of West Africa in 1640?  Or perhaps, in Egypt?

Then there’s language, words and word origins.  I’m not suggesting that you need to necessarily learn a new language, but would a review of Latin and Latinate legal phrases be worth your while and take you out of your research comfort zone? It would certainly improve your research skills.  For example, when you find the legal term “messuage” in a document, do you know its origin?  Have you studied the economic activity of the mid 17^th century well enough to know how things like property, tools and livestock were valued?

Maybe it’s time to learn a bit about architecture since, after all, the people we research had to live somewhere. Do you know what quoining is and why some bricklayers used Flemish bond?  What does a 17^th century nail look like? What’s an adze? Did they use the same building tools in New England and in New France? Oh, yeah – just how big is an arpent?

Recently, as archivists moved the thousands of boxes of papers of the late Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia to their new home at Shepherd College, one of his staffers pointed out one of his dictionaries.  It was well-worn, heavily underlined and annotated in the margins.  The staffer pointed out that Byrd (1917 -2010) set out years earlier to learn at least one or two new words every single day. 

Byrd, the longest serving member of Congress ever in the United States,  understood the importance of getting out of the Comfort Zone every day – even when he didn’t have to.

Getting out of that cozy comfort zone is good for the research soul.  Give it a shot in 2011.

Have a Happy!